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Review

Promising Young Woman (2020)

Revenge thriller, hold the revenge

It seems fair to judge Promising Young Woman as a “message film” when that’s how it’s so clearly positioned itself: Cassie (Carey Mulligan), a lonely medical school dropout, spends the film chasing down and humiliating creeps as a tribute to her late friend Nina who was raped and later died by suicide when the system brought no justice. But it’s a blunt bit of didacticism; there’s very little shading or depth to the #MeToo reckoning it promises, just the same button pushed over and over for 90 of its 105 minutes (more on that last 15 in a sec). There are no ripples or surprises to Cassie’s grief and trauma: it’s simply an inescapable, repetitive slog.

As a revenge story, it’s not up to snuff either, although I think it gets a bit further here. Carey Mulligan is lights-out at every wrinkle of the lead role, able to play angry and heartbroken and badass in all sorts of different flavors as each moment requires. But the very nature of Cassie’s main scheme is anti-cathartic. To what purpose she lures men and gives them a stern lecture without actually committing any harm, I’m not sure. I would buy the idea that her scheme is psychological vengeance rather than physical, except we don’t relish in any of her victim’s discomfort — Cassie and the movie move on as soon whenever she starts putting the clamp down.

The film’s handful of truly excellent scenes involve Cassie tracking down loose threads from the trauma from her younger years. There’s an exchange with a college dean who is dismissive of the school’s dark past that is terrifically tense (though I wish the dean was maybe like 5% less tone deaf and thus more believable and scary), while the awkward lunch with old girlfriend Madison, who refuses to talk about an old dark secret, would be genuinely terrific if Alison Brie gave a better performance. (Margot Robbie produced the film; surely she could have appeared for Brie’s two scenes.)

I also really like the arc with Ryan (Bo Burnham), an old college pal who has grown out of his partying ways, for most of its duration. It’s the one plot thread in which the film seems interested in digging through the complexities of systemic rape culture and all of its little enablers rather than the obvious big bads. In other words, he’s one of the only characters we can’t immediately characterize as “hero” or “villain” based on surface-level behavior the first time we meet him. Ryan’s such a human character in the film that it really lands the idea that the complacency of otherwise decent people is the knotty root of sexual abuse. Of course, even he ends up deeply unsympathetic by the end like the rest.

The casting of the men, in general, is incredible. It must be intentional that so many of the actors are from iconic late-00s shows and films, several of which lazily trafficked in rapey cliches from party “hookup” culture that this movie tears down. You’ve got McLovin and Seth Cohen from properties I assume I don’t need to name; Schmidt from New Girl and Dell from Veronica Mars, too. Burnham himself is a former YouTube wunderkind who made his name with edgy joke-songs; I haven’t revisited them in awhile, but I’m sure he had some problematic one-liners in there.

As hit-or-miss as the story itself is, the presentation is quite good. Debut director Emerald Fennell’s has fun, natural instincts even if her chops aren’t fully developed or a great fit for the material: she clearly  wants to makes this trashier than the script permits it to be, and she is obviously itching to go full chaos goblin with the twisty soap — which is why I’m so excited to see Saltburn — but the film looks colorful and snappy. Some of the compositions and imagery are very attractive, rarely too on-the-nose or showy.

So what about those final fifteen minutes? (Spoilers ahoy.) I understand the narrative motivation behind the big twist — absolution through death and burning, Cassie bearing the weight of all women’s suffering as if a Christ-like figure; bringing down the boys club the only way she can, self-immolation. And yet killing the protagonist only further undercuts some of the core #MeToo concepts: victimhood here is a scarlet letter that leaves no room for a healing or shading or justice until death.

(Purportedly, Fennell initially wanted to end the film with the shot of Cassie’s body burning, which wouldn’t have solved all of the problems, but would have been such a bleak, “fuck you” exclamation point that I would have respected it more as a closer than the final act of revenge-beyond-the-grave we get as the conclusion instead.)

But, as a piece of melodramatic, pulpy plotting — trash as I said earlier — the ending has some verve. It made me wish that I wasn’t watching a message movie, that Fennell was just having fun. The twisty ending could have been some high operatic bullshit instead of a confused grace note on a heavy-handed film whose strengths and strong moments can’t overcome its problems.

Is It Good?

Nearly Good (4/8)

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